Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!

Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!

If I had been president, I would have come out and declared: "Nothing there, ever! This place stays as it is. We make a big place there where people can pray about the errors we have made that those two towers had to fall."

It took two years of me telling Canon engineers that a camera is a thing between the human hand and the human eye, so it had to have ergonomics on both sides! They got the message, and we did it, and overnight it was the camera of the world. Everyone - Nikon, Yashica, Sony - all copied Colani.

You see, if you are 30 years ahead of your time, you will always have difficulty speaking with the bosses in the industry. They are too conservative.

An architect has to build the building from the inside out, not the outside in!

I was 3 years old, and we had a very rich neighbor in Berlin who drove a Mercedes sports car. I remember standing behind this car, admiring the trunk, how nicely shaped it was, for an hour. That shape has never left me - I could design it today!